A burial site for Kurdish guerrilla fighters, dug hastily by the Turkish police six years ago, arouses suspicion that some bodies have been inappropriately “buried in pairs”, reports Mezopotamya Agency.
Located on a foothill near the central district of the Hakkari (Colemêrg) province, the burial site is one of similar sites opened for Kurdish guerrilla fighters killed during armed clashes with the Turkish army in Turkey’s Kurdish majority provinces in 2015 and 2016.
The police had refused to take the bodies of the deceased to the relatives, even after the prolonged curfews implemented in the region at the time had ended. They had also prevented any family burials in the cemetery reserved for the fallen fighters, Serê Solan, and instead had dug another burial site in an area far below the Serê Solan Cemetery.
Today there are a total of 12 tombstones at this police burial site, despite there only being 9 graves suggesting multiple burials in single graves.
There is a different number written on each stone from 1 to 13, omitting suspiciously the number 4, while the “K” or “E” markings next to the numbers are initials of the Turkish words for gender, “kadın” (female) and “erkek” (male). Positioned on a very steep slope without any space in between, the graves are also at risk of disappearance due to landslides, according to the observers.
The atrocities of the Turkish army and police forces towards fallen Kurdish fighter’s remains are not uncommon since the escalation of the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state in the early 90’s.
Killed in December 2015 in the Diyarbakır (Amed) province during the same military operations and the accompanying curfews in the region, Hakan Arslan’s remains were just recently able to be collected by his father Ali Rıza Arslan, and were unceremoniously handed to him in a plastic bag.